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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Beautiful and Damned: Geographies of Interwar Kansas City Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2m26z9v3 Author Owen, Lance Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Beautiful and Damned: Geographies of Interwar Kansas City By Lance Russell Owen A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Johns, Chair Professor Paul Groth Professor Margaret Crawford Professor Louise Mozingo Fall 2016 Abstract Beautiful and Damned: Geographies of Interwar Kansas City by Lance Russell Owen Doctor of Philosophy in Geography University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Johns, Chair Between the World Wars, Kansas City, Missouri, achieved what no American city ever had, earning a Janus-faced reputation as America’s most beautiful and most corrupt and crime-ridden city. Delving into politics, architecture, social life, and artistic production, this dissertation explores the geographic realities of this peculiar identity. It illuminates the contours of the city’s two figurative territories: the corrupt and violent urban core presided over by political boss Tom Pendergast, and the pristine suburban world shaped by developer J. C. Nichols. It considers the ways in which these seemingly divergent regimes in fact shaped together the city’s most iconic features—its Country Club District and Plaza, a unique brand of jazz, a seemingly sophisticated aesthetic legacy written in boulevards and fine art, and a landscape of vice whose relative scale was unrivalled by that of any other American city. Finally, it elucidates the reality that, by sustaining these two worlds in one metropolis, America’s heartland city also sowed the seeds of its own destruction; with its cultural economy tied to political corruption and organized crime, its pristine suburban fabric woven from prejudice and exclusion, and its aspirations for urban greatness weighed down by provincial mindsets and mannerisms, Kansas City’s time in the limelight would be short lived. In the end, Kansas City's apotheosis of identity was—like that of every city's—as tenuous as it was definitive. 1 Contents Introduction: Beautiful and Damned 1 I. The Core 8 II. The Periphery 68 III. Art and Artifice 119 i A narrow outside balcony ran along the whole length of Karl’s room. But what would have been at home the highest vantage point in the town allowed him here little more than a view of one street, which ran perfectly straight between two rows of squarely chopped buildings and therefore seemed to be fleeing into the distance, where the outlines of a cathedral loomed enormous in a dense haze. From morning to evening and far into the dreaming night that street was the channel for a constant stream of traffic which, seen from above, looked like an inextricable confusion, for ever newly improvised, of foreshortened human figures and the roofs of all kinds of vehicles, sending into the upper air another confusion, more riotous and complicated, of noises, dust and smells, all of it enveloped and penetrated by a flood of light which the multitudinous objects in the street scattered, carried off and again busily brought back, with an effect as palpable to the dazzled eye as if a glass roof stretched over the street were being violently smashed into fragments at every moment. —Franz Kafka, Amerika How strange to find that the present contained such a bright shard of the living past, damaged and eroded but not destroyed. —Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch Kansas City is a matter of opinion. It is either in the middle of nowhere or the middle of everything. —Tracy Thomas and Walt Bodine, Right Here in River City ii INTRODUCTION: BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED In the eyes of the moralist, cities afford a wider field both for virtue and vice; and they are more prone to innovation, whether for good or evil. … [and] whatever may be the good or evil tendencies of populous cities, they are the result to which all countries that are at once fertile, free and intelligent, inevitably tend. —George Tucker, The Progress of the United States1 The Bowery, the Barbary Coast, Chinatown, the Orient, Singapore and other notorious spots on the globe that have been in the spotlight of fact or fancy—none of them had anything on Kansas City, the ‘Heart of America,’ the city of beautiful homes, parks and boulevards, the ‘Gateway to the Southwest. —Lear B. Reed, Human Wolves: Seventeen Years of War on Crime2 The remnants of the old walking city were still visible, from the brick rowhouses and kaleidoscopic market of the North End to the Gilded Age mansions built by elites eager to escape the stench and cacophony of the West Bottoms—the floodplain landscape whose packing houses, mills, and railyards pulsed to the rhythms of slaughter and harvest. The years just before and after World War I had refashioned that rambling city, bringing with them new ways of life that made for a transformed urban experience. Zoning laws gave a new sense of order to the city’s appearance. An embrace of the automobile catalyzed a new breed of suburb—unhinged from the streetcar line—that drew more and more residents into a life of sylvan privilege that was increasingly independent of the urban core. And in that core, a deluge of capital, a widespread fever for speculation, and a revolution in architectural aesthetics yielded a crop of slender, radiant skyscrapers—structures whose unapologetic glamour helped confirm the reality that the city’s commercial and cultural heart was becoming a lifestyle as much as a place. Yet as locals, journalists, and visitors saw it, there was something distinct about the landscape of Kansas City, Missouri, as it developed in the 1920s and ‘30s. In America’s nineteenth largest city, the suburbs seemed greener, the industry more muscular, and the urban core uncommonly energetic, incendiary, and rowdy. “In its railroad yards,” observed Shaemas O’Sheel in The New Republic in 1928, “the swift pulse of American commerce beats hugely,” a trait that was equally evident in the city’s factories and towering office buildings. Yet O’Sheel also noticed something else in the character of Kansas City: an overwhelming enthusiasm for the “centrifugal impulse” evident in its “glamorous regions” of suburbs, “which reward Success with everything that enters into the America’s domestic ideal, which give the city something to show to strangers, and which are undoubtedly the most potent of incentives to every forward-looking young man with a wife and kiddies.”3 Few American cities—and certainly none similar to Kansas City in size— inspired such polarized impressions. And if O’Sheel was sunny in his optimism for a “city of contrasts,” others spied a city whose energy and elegance were countered by darkness and depravity. English journalist Alfred Perry, for instance, was impressed by Kansas City’s sylvan glory, but noted that it coexisted with an 1 Quoted in Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 240-241. 2 Lear B. Reed, Human Wolves: Seventeen Years of War on Crime (Kansas City: MO: Brown-White-Lowell Press, 1941), 190. 3 Shaemas O’Sheel, “Kansas City: Crossroads of the Continent,” The New Republic (May 16, 1928), 375-376. 1 urban core flavored by an incomprehensible level of vice and violence: “last year eighty-nine persons were murdered in this city,” Perry observed, noting that such numbers put Kansas City’s homicide rate above Chicago’s as well as that of the whole of England.4 Other commentators gave an even greater emphasis to this surreal counterpoint. “Here is a paradox for you,” wrote syndicated journalist Westbrook Pegler in 1939: “Tom Pendergast, the Democratic boss of Kansas City, gives good, rotten government, and runs a good, rotten city whose conventional Americans of the home-loving, baby- having, 100 per cent type live on terms of mutual toleration with wide open vice and gambling.”5 U. S. Attorney Maurice Milligan was similarly baffled, writing that he could not understand “how a city of beautiful homes, an imposing art center, with splendid public buildings, spacious parks and playgrounds, and other marks of culture and beauty could exist side by side with a corrupt machine run by a boss like Pendergast.”6 These impressions of a Janus-faced metropolis were not superficial hyperbole: they traced the contours of a city that was reaching its peak as a new metropolitan format and culture were emerging in the wake of World War I. When the United States Census reported in 1920 that, for the first time, cities housed the majority of the nation’s population, many Americans were aware that cities were also transforming in look, feel, and character thanks to unprecedented developments in economics, technology, governance, planning, and social norms. That new urban character was most apparent downtown. Downtown had long been the beating heart of the city, but the Jazz Age ushered in a newly feverish pulse thanks to an unprecedented level of activity and a new ethos of organization. More residents than ever were flooding the scene every morning to work in the office buildings that were increasingly calibrated mechanisms for organizing corporate labor.7 Cars clogged the streets, patrons packed theaters to behold the new technology of the motion picture, and expanded power grids showered the tapering apexes of new skyscrapers with light and powered massive conveyor belts in new factories on the core’s edge to churn out an unprecedented array of new consumer goods for an increasingly affluent society.